Feature

China’s aborted sex theme park

Why China built, then destroyed, its first sexually explicit theme park, Love Land

China’s first-ever theme park dedicated to sex just experienced “construction interruptus,” said Arthur Levine in About.com, when the local government in Chongqing determined it was socially inappropriate and ordered it bulldozed. The unfinished park, called Love Land, was to offer “titillating” exhibits such as sex-technique workshops. (watch video news roundup, with photos)

It was the giant G-string-topped pair of women’s legs that went “too far for China’s prudish authorities,” said Jane Macartney in The Times of London. Park manager Lu Xiaoqing had envisioned Love Land as a way to break the “ancient taboo” of talking openly about sex, but this “apparent act of altruism” didn’t sit well with the censors, or many of the locals.

Public protest killed the “enlightened” idea of a sex-education museum, said Li Hongmei in China’s People’s Daily, but China wasn’t always so prudish. In the “prism of the ancient Chinese history,” sex and love affairs were long “main themes in human life” and culture. The Cultural Revolution killed that, and we Chinese are still paying the price in scanty knowledge about sex and STDs, and poor sex lives.

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